Ford Eileen - Model Woman: Eileen Ford and the Business of Beauty

FOR JANE

My own Model Woman

model: A person or thing regarded as an excellent example of a specified quality... A person employed to display clothes by wearing them.

Oxford English Dictionary

I T WAS STILL BARELY LIGHT ON A CRISP MANHATTAN MORNING, and John Casablancas was dozing contentedly, lying alone in his wide Carlyle hotel bed. Such solitude was not the custom for the dashing thirty-three-year-old. As the owner and very hands-on manager of Pariss hottest fashion sensation, Elite Model Management, Casablancas was directing the destinies of some of the worlds most desirable women. Yet on this late-fall morning in 1976, the man known as Pariss Sundance Kid had serious business in his sights.

He had arrived in New York the previous night, purportedly on a leisure trip, and had gone straight up to his suite, taking pains to ensure that no one in the fashion world knew he was there. His mission was secret, and he had discussed his ambitions with very few. After the tear-away success of Elite in Paris, Casablancas was plotting to set up his own model management agency in New York, defying the no-poaching protocols that had applied across the Atlantic since modeling began, and challenging the dominance of Americas grandest and most established model managers: Zoli, Wilhelmina, Stewart Cowley, and the very grandest and longest-established model agent of them all, Eileen Ford.

Casablancas was still half asleep at 8:30 a.m. when the phone beside his bed rang.

Good morning, Johnny, growled a female voice dripping with malevolence and delight at its owners cleverness. How are you? I just want to be the first to give you the big news. Your business in New York... is not going to happen, my friend.

FIERCE, DEMANDING, AND UNASHAMEDLY EAGER TO TRIUMPH IN EVERY battle, Eileen Ford was more than the queen; she was the empress of American modelinga mixture of Mary Tyler Moore and Barbara Walters, but tougher. John Casablancas liked to refer to his bitter rival as Catherine the Great. Love her or loathe her, no one could deny that Eileen Ford had clawed her way to the very top of the rag trade pantheon, and could jostle her padded power shoulders with its most powerful titans. Sarah Doukas, the young British agent who made her name when she discovered Kate Moss in a JFK airport check-in line, recalls the designer Valentino catching the eye of Eileen Ford at a fashion show and nodding to her with wary respect. The two of them saluted each other like royalty.

Eileen Ford had founded her modeling agency in 1947 with her husband, Jerry, and for more than a quarter century the Fords had been at the top of the heap. If you bought a Ford car, you knew you would get solid, workmanlike performance. If you booked a Ford model, you got Ferrari and Porsche glamourwith Rolls-Royce prestige and prices. Dorian Leigh, Suzy Parker, Jean Patchett, Dovima, Carmen DellOrefice, Lauren Huttonby 1976 the Fords had model-managed Americas finest, and Europes as well. When Jean Shrimpton came to New York for a break from Swinging London, it was always with Ford that she worked.

The queen held court at East Fifty-Ninth Street, in a five-story converted warehouse facing the ramp from the Queensboro Bridge, its reception area decorated with wood panels like a chalet in the Austrian Alps. At first glance, the worlds largest modeling agency appeared to be operating out of the log cabin of the Von Trapp Family Singers.

Why not? was Eileens response to being questioned on her choice of dcor. I liked that style since I read Heidi as a child.

It was one of Eileens regal prerogatives to be capricious. Stomping across her reception area one morning in the summer of 1977, she swept past two bright-eyed hopefuls waiting to see her, ignoring their eagerly proffered model books, and walked straight up to her office as if the young women were another set of panels on the wall. Having made them wait an hour or two while she conducted an interview with journalist Anthony Haden-Guest, she then retraced her steps and deigned to stop in front of one of the women, jabbing with a pencil in her direction.

What are you doing here?

Waiting to see you, Miss Ford.

The pencil remained poised as Eileen scanned the woman, before her eyes went totally and rather alarmingly blank. It was as if a torch had been brightly pointed in the candidates direction, wrote Haden-Guest, to be switched off just as suddenly.

Come back and see me, she said to the young woman. Come back and see me when youve lost twelve pounds.

Eileen Ford liked to explain how apparent cruelty was kinder to most wannabe beauty icons than thoughtlessly prolonging their hopes. There is not one girl in two hundred of those who present themselves to me has got a chance of making it as a professional model, and it is wicked to let them think otherwise. It is part of my duty to help the other hundred and ninety-nine to get on with their lives.

The preeminence of the Ford Modeling Agency was based on Eileen Fords uncanny ability to pick out the success story lurking inside candidate number two hundred, blending her eye for talent with some other sixth sense that detected the originality in, say, Lauren Huttonfor whom Jerry Ford, in 1973, had negotiated modelings largest-ever advertising contract to that date: two hundred thousand dollars with Revlonwhen other agents had not been able to see beyond Huttons quirkily misaligned gaze and the gap in her front teeth. Jerry Ford took care of the business side of things, leaving his wife free to act as the agencys eye, and four times a year that eye headed across the Atlantic with her husband to scout the talent of Europe. London, Paris, and Scandinavia were her happiest hunting grounds, providing regular consignments of comely young women capable of earning a hundred thousand dollars a year, the going rate for a top model in the early 1970s.

Fords revenue from that was roughly twenty thousand dollarstwo-thirds or so from the 1520 percent commission charged to the model, with a further 10 percent charged to any advertising client. In 1970 the agency raked in some five million dollars income from its stable of 180 models, and John Casablancas had come to New York in 1976 to start hewing out his own loot from the gold mine that never seemed to stop giving.

In Eileen Fords mind, however, revenue was not the sole or even the principal reason she could not allow Elite Model Management and its raffish owner to happen in New York. In the eyes of the godmother of modelingthe title that Life magazine bestowed upon Eileen Ford in November 1970money came second to her particular version of morality. Johnnys problem was that he didnt just want to steal the talent, she later explained; he wanted to boff it.

From the start of her career Eileen Ford had prided herself on shielding her girls from the predatory males who lurked in every corner of the business, from lascivious photographers to clients looking for extra favors in return for their patronage. She really could be ferocious, recalls Rusty Donovan Zeddis, a Ford booker for many years. If a girl came back to the office with a story of suggestiveness or any sort of inappropriate pressure, Eileen would get straight on the phone and bawl the guy out. Then he was blacklisted. He would be lucky to hire a Ford model again.

Even the sainted Richard Avedon, against whom no accusations of impropriety were ever made, lived in fear of the call that might come if ever a photo session with a Ford model stretched out longer than intended. I remember Dick quite losing his cool and going to the phone himself, recalls a Ford model from the late 1940s. He couldnt concentrate until hed made certain Eileen would let him have the extra half hourand, of course, he had to pay extra for it.